Hate mail - How do you handle it?

I still get e-mail occasionally over a Star Trek: Shattered Universe review I wrote in, like, late 2003. It’s usually pretty funny.

Now that I’ve read the review I have to say I agree with Jason’s criticisms. The silly melodrama, the ludicrous character models, the blurry textures, the wacky combat system, the endless sewers… even discounting the bugs I didn’t like the game much.

Oh, how I wish I would get hate mail. That way, at least you can tell someone read it.

I don’t know where you type your crap up, though I’m assuming you get paid for it. Well, you go to the guy who pays you for it, give him the hate mail with cute little public replies to be published, and ask for a bonus or something.

See, immediately, you’re lying. Unless off course you killed Johansen to get your jollies off. To have correctly rescued him required typing SaveJohansen() into the console. It was buggy.

I get lots of hate mail, mostly about the Furby Autopsy, but sometimes about Yeti@Home or Schrodinger’s Cat or any of the other crap on phobe.com. Mostly I ignore it, but if it’s really stupid, I respond very, very politely, as if I don’t really understand what you meant and could you please explain further?, using a lot of big words and signing with an official-sounding fake professor and/or scientist name.

It must confuse them, because they either apologize profusely or just don’t ever write back.

I think you can replace “MMO” with “game”. Genre doen’t matter.

Flight sim fans can be pretty damn scary. And not in a good way.

-CJ

Every bit of hate mail I’ve ever received has been hilariously funny in some way - usually someone making a rookie mistake like writing to me in the guise of a diehard fan of their game, but sending it from an e-mail account with their real name in it. Had that most recently from the folks making the Beyond Good and Evil fan-movie after I said something extremely mild about their shitty web design. They promptly fired back a barely literate missive that not only left the main guy’s name in the address but included their website address in the Reply To header. Doh! Double-Doh!

Why write hate mail to a game reviewer? They never read or respond to that stuff anyway. Just find their website, join their forum and hound them mercilessly like many here do to Asher and Chick.

When I worked at Daily Radar I got loads and loads of hate mail. At first I was flustered by it, especially when much of the early reviews were really negative. The EiC told me to ignore the angry mail, but for a lark I started to reply to them and the more vitriolic the email, the more polite my response would be. What was funny was that people would reply to my reply and often apologize for their angry, spur-of-the-moment tirades. There were a few that wouldn’t let it go, but most people mellow when they realize they are taking to a human being and not Imagine Media or Ziff-Davis or whatever. It was the same with the Penny Arcade guys. They were incredibly polite to me in personal emails, but just vicious in their comic strips.

So I would suggest trying to respond just as a lark and see what happens. Of course, now that I work at EA whenever I get angry emails I just buy that person and that’s the end of the issue.

I got hate mail from the CEO of a developer once. It wasn’t even a review, it was just a “this game ships today” piece of news. And it wasn’t even a Battlecruiser game.

I just read it and frankly it comes across as more of an excercise in humor/cleverness rather than an actual review. Although if that is what the audience expects at that site, job well done.

Anyhow, games are just like any other form of entertainment - the enjoyablity of something doesn’t directly relate to its quality. I don’t think most people are able to differentiate between the two. If I like ‘x’, ‘x’ must be great. There is a huge difference between listening to a song, watching a movie, playing a game, etc - and analyizing it critically.

See, immediately, you’re lying. Unless off course you killed Johansen to get your jollies off. To have correctly rescued him required typing SaveJohansen() into the console. It was buggy.

Nah, not lying. Just haven’t come close to finishing the games. Which is a far cry from the initial release where people were complaining about bugs in the training area, for god’s sake!

I think a lot of McMaster’s dislike is based on perspective. It’s an RPG. For an RPG the graphics and character animation are superb because, well, it’s the first RPG I know of on PC that has anywhere close to modern technology. I can see where if you’re used to only FPS type games it might be a let-down, especially in comparison to HL2. However, I wouldn’t choose HL2 as a contemporary game comparison for an RPG because, well, it’s not an RPG.

(Similarly, I’ve nad no real issues with the combat system because, well, it’s an RPG. And the type of game I’m expected to play doesn’t really need smooth as silk combat systems, as long as they’re workable. I definitely find the combat system workable so far. I tend to think if I get into combat that requires me to fight more/more precisely than I can, that I’ve screwed something up in the RPG portion of the game. Perhaps the latter parts of the game will prove me wrong.)

I got tons of hate mail when I did reviews for Avault. I was one of the first to “pan” Dungeon Siege (3/5 stars :p) and boy did I get raked over the coals by some people for it. I responded to the intelligent and well argued ones. The one and two liners I just threw away. Some people appreciated the responses and wrote back to tell me.

I also got a few death threats when the whole Fallout 3 news hit the web. Always a good time :) One idiot wrote me a death threat from his comcast address with his full name attached.

Did you forward it to the po-lice?

I got hate mail from Stevie Case once - she was defending her boyfriend (Romero - Daikatana). My mistake? I responded somewhat in kind. That was a mistake. What I SHOULD have done was had my wife respond. ;-)
I still kick myself over that one.

I get lots more praise mail than hate mail at my website, but that probably has more to do with the nature of that website than anything else.

Bah. You guys should have seen the mail we got at FilePlanet after introducing the subscription service. Talk about vitriol.

I personally usually ignored them unless they were specific (e.g., “The information on this file is wrong, dumbasses”) because I was too busy. But a couple of months in I took a random sampling of like 400 e-mails and content analyzed them to highlight the major areas of complaint. A lot of that information went into our online FAQs, customer service infobanks, and redesign of things like site navigation, registration flow, marketing, etc.

What’s amazing, though, is that when I did respond to a specific piece of hate mail and did it in a way that was polite and addressed their complaint, I almost always got responses back along the lines of “Wow, I can’t believe someone actually read my letter. I’m sorry I sounded like a jerk.” Thing is, if you give that same response on a public forum and you get the living crap flamed out of you. People are weird.

Email is one-on-one. So it’s much more personal. On a forum, you are treated as an answerbot, and there’s crowd mentality at work. One asshole begets another, and then the piling on begins.

Can you provide a link to the review Jason?

They’re just getting back at you for giving Doom 3 10/10.

Yeah, it’s still not that good. Rating the game on it’s bugs is like rating HL2 on the Steam delivery system. Something the consumer needs to hear about though ultimately something impermanent. People change, games change, reviews change, the fans of this game are just all rabid and in love with Velvet Velour. He also disclaims it might be better after patching at the end of his review.

Well, the graphics could have looked like HL2, right? I mean it’s the source engine. Once you have a good engine it’s just a breeze to make models like HL2. The only RPG graphics rating should be for the readability of font.

(Similarly, I’ve nad no real issues with the combat system because, well, it’s an RPG. And the type of game I’m expected to play doesn’t really need smooth as silk combat systems, as long as they’re workable. I definitely find the combat system workable so far. I tend to think if I get into combat that requires me to fight more/more precisely than I can, that I’ve screwed something up in the RPG portion of the game. Perhaps the latter parts of the game will prove me wrong.)

I had no issue with the combat system because I picked a clan with celerity. His only gripe seems to be that a Vampire can bring a bat to a gun fight, I guess you could pull the trigger with your supernatural strength and hope the bullet hits harder, whatever.

As for ignoring or answering. The people already have the game, either you’re going to make them change their mind then they burn Bloodlines with their Football Jersey in their oil drum of failed endeavors or you’re just going to let them think they are smarter than you because their opinion about a videogame is right. So, just filter out the words ‘bloodline’ and ‘masquerade’ in your e-mail.